The Federal Communications Commission's Office of Managing Director announced that the proposed universal service contribution factor for the third quarter of 2019 will be 0.244 or 24.4 percent. 

Pole attachment rental rates are a fraction of the overall cost to build broadband systems in rural areas. Rather, the major impediments to rural broadband development are low population densities, high capital costs and other major operating expenses in rural areas. Because electric cooperatives are led by and belong to the communities they serve, they are keenly familiar with these challenges. The same economic factors that prevented for-profit electric utilities from extending service to rural areas in the 1930s exists today in relation to broadband. Policymakers should focus on these steps to close the digital divide and provide rural communities access to broadband:

1. Improving the accuracy and veracity of broadband data to better identify and understand services gaps.
2. Prioritize broadband funding, especially government grants, to projects in areas with the lowest population densities since that is the greatest barrier to deployment.
3. Provide adequate funding to build broadband networks that will meet the growing speed and data needs.

Cities across the US are trying to become “smart cities,” as they invest in digital technologies to help monitor the environment, enhance mobility, and improve the delivery of municipal services. An examination of several cities which have sought to embrace smart city technology while keeping equity in the forefront shows that:

• Planning makes a difference: A number of cities have conducted planning exercises that explicitly takes equity into account for smart city investments. Often, this planning is part of years-long municipal investment in and attention to the local impacts of digital technology.
• City leadership matters: Cities that made the smart city-equity link often do so because elected officials make it a priority. This shows up in organizational charts, i.e., dedicated city staff whose jobs focuses on encouraging city departments to examine how smart city initiatives impact equity and can be vehicles to improve digital equity.
• Community outreach can promote buy-in: Many cities actively reach out to all segments of the community not just to educate them about smart city technologies, but to elicit feedback from citizens. By making the smart city dialogue a co-creative process, cities have a better chance of making sure the smart city is equitable.
• Finding pressure points for fund-raising can bear fruit: Cities need resources for digital inclusion and smart cities, and some places have raised funds for inclusion through local franchise agreements with cable and telecom companies for infrastructure buildout. This last point comes with a red flag. The Federal Communications Commission has constrained cities’ ability to charge franchise fees for buildout of a key smart city technology – 5G wireless networks. Given that, and absent repeal of the FCC’s rule, Congress should consider a smart cities grant program that gives cities the resources to plan for digital inclusion as investments in smart cities continue to unfold. The recent introduction of the Digital Equity Act offers a potential vehicle for funding such a program.

For people in prisons and jails, voicemail can still be very useful. Corrio is a Washington state-based company co-founded by Alex Peder, a former inmate himself, that offers a service that lets inmates call a special number assigned to them and then record a voice message that gets texted as a link to any person the prison or jail has allowed them to contact. It connects the facility’s network to Corrio’s private switch network, and a person on the outside can send a regular text to the inmate, as well as record voicemails. The inmate can check their messages at any time they have access to a phone, listening to the recording or to texts that are automatically converted into voice messages. The aim for Corrio’s messaging platform, which launched June 11, is to make the communication process easier, given that maintaining contact with the outside world has consistently been proven to be beneficial for the incarcerated person’s wellbeing and rehabilitation. Peder said that in tests, the messages were largely very short, concise, often as simple as “I love you.”

e digital economy is a fact of life, but it is not all things to all people.  There has been robust public discussion about whether the broader economy, undoubtedly transformed by digital technologies, is working well for everyone.  While some commenters have tried to dispatch the antitrust laws to address these problems, I do not believe the antitrust laws are bent towards values other than competition. Therefore, the right question is whether a defined market is competitive.  That is the province of the antitrust laws.... As we think about antitrust enforcement in the digital economy, the key issues that antitrust enforcers must untangle are whether a company is growing due to superior price, quality, and innovation, or whether some transaction or business practice is, on balance, anticompetitive in purpose and effect.  

1. As the Microsoft case and other enforcement actions involving digital technologies show, we already have in our possession the tools we need to enforce the antitrust laws in cases involving digital technologies.  U.S. antitrust law is flexible enough to be applied to markets old and new. 
2. In order to understand what conduct is anticompetitive and thus unlawful, the Antitrust Division works hard to become expert on the commercial realities of the digital economy. 
3. Clever positioning should not obscure what is otherwise ordinary evidence of an antitrust violation.  Where a company has market power, enforcers should be circumspect about conduct that does not plausibly advance a legitimate business objective and transactions that eliminate competition.  Depending on the commercial realities of a given market, enforcers may uncover facts that support taking a longer-than-usual view of entry.
4. Antitrust Division does not take a myopic view of competition.  Many recent calls for antitrust reform, or more radical change, are premised on the incorrect notion that antitrust policy is only concerned with keeping prices low.  It is well-settled, however, that competition has price and non-price dimensions.

Apparently, Facebook uncovered emails that appear to connect Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg to potentially problematic privacy practices at the company. Within the company, the unearthing of the emails in the process of responding to a continuing federal privacy investigation has raised concerns that they would be harmful to Facebook—at least from a public-relations standpoint—if they were to become public. The potential impact of the internal emails has been a factor in the tech giant’s desire to reach a speedy settlement of the investigation by the Federal Trade Commission. Facebook is operating under a 2012 consent decree with the agency related to privacy, and the emails sent around that time suggest that Zuckerberg and other senior executives didn’t make compliance with the FTC order a priority.